Thirteen Hours

by Deon Meyer

  'But you can't see this house from the mountain,' said Joubert, nodding at the Victorian building beside them.

  'That's true . ..' Lost in thought again, Benny's brain was searching, Joubert knew. He knew the frustration, the junkyard of information from a day like today when everything happened at once. You had to sift through the chaos; everything you had heard and seen, everything you knew, had to be sorted. For him it was the labour of the night, when he lay beside Margaret, behind her warm body with his hand on the rounding of her belly. Then his thoughts would travel down slow, systematic pathways. But

  Griessel's process was different: impatient, quick, not always faultless, but much faster. Griessel's head jerked, a tumbler had dropped and he looked down the street and began walking in that direction. Joubert had to stretch his long legs to keep up. A hundred metres further on, Griessel stopped in a driveway, looking at the house, the garage. 'He sat here, in a bakkie ...' Excited. 'He nearly drove us off the road ...'

  Griessel jogged up the drive, turned and looked back at Piet van der Lingen's house and said: 'No ...' He walked back and forth, jumped up and down and said: 'Mat come and stand here.'

  Joubert came and stood there.

  'Stand on your toes.'

  Joubert stretched.

  'What can you see of the house?'

  The big man looked. 'Just too low to see everything.'

  'He drove out of here, a guy in a bakkie. Toyota four-by-four, faded red, the old model. Little fucker behind the wheel was young, in a hell of a hurry, drove right in front of us and raced off towards the city ...'

  Joubert focused differently, unburdened by memories. 'He could have stood on the bakkie,' he said. 'He would have been able to see everything then.'

  'Jissis,' said Griessel. 'Young, he was young, just like the others.' He looked at Joubert. 'I will recognise him, Mat, if I see his fucking face again. I will know him.' He was quiet for a heartbeat, then he said: 'An old Toyota . . . that's not a drug dealer's car, Mat...'

  Griessel's phone rang. He checked the screen before he answered. 'Sarge?' He listened for about forty seconds and began walking. Mat Joubert walked behind him, faster and faster, keeping his eyes on Griessel. Here came the tsunami again.

  'Get more people, Sarge,' said Griessel over the phone. 'I'm coming.'

  Griessel looked back at Joubert, the familiar, spark-shooting fire in his eyes. 'About ten minutes ago someone dropped off a young white guy at City Park Casualties, and then left. In haste. Victim was stabbed in the throat with a blade; they might be able to save him. I'm off, Mat...' Griessel began to run.

  'I'll do the scene,' shouted Joubert after him.

  'Thanks, Mat.' Benny's words were blown away on the wind.

  'Get her, Benny,' shouted Joubert, but he couldn't tell if Benny had heard him. He watched his colleague's running figure, so determined, so urgent, and again he felt that emotion, nostalgia, sadness, as though it were the last time he would see Benny Griessel.

  Chapter 38

  It was Jess Anderson who broke the silence in the study and put words to their anxiety. 'Why doesn't he call?'

  Bill Anderson did not want to sit, he wanted to walk up and down to vent some of his tension. But he couldn't, because he knew that would upset his wife even more. So he sat beside her on the brown leather couch. His lawyer friend, Connelly, and the Police Chief, Dombkowski, had insisted he stay, so he could be here when the South African policeman phoned. Now he was sorry he hadn't gone along to Erin's parents. It was his duty. But he couldn't leave Jess alone in these circumstances.

  'It's almost forty minutes,' she said.

  'We don't know how far he had to travel,' said Anderson.

  'We could call him ...'

  'Let's give it a little more time.'

  They held her down on the concrete floor, four of them. A fifth put a blade under her T-shirt and cut it away, then her shorts, then her underwear. The same knife that had cut Erin's throat, the same hand, stripped her naked, effortlessly. They pulled her up and pushed her against the narrow steel pillar, her arms bent backwards and tied with something around the pole. Then they stood back and all she could do was sink down as far as her bonds allowed, to hide her shame, so that her gaze fixed on her running shoes.

  'Where is it?'

  She didn't answer. She heard him coming, footfalls on the floor, two steps only. He grabbed her hair and jerked her head up so that it banged against the metal of the pillar. He knelt in front of her.

  'Where is it?' the question was repeated.

  Her left eye was swollen shut and painful. She focused the other on him. His handsome face was against hers, calm. As ever. His voice carried only authority, control.

  Her revulsion for him was greater than her fear of death. This knowledge came in a rush; it liberated her and brought with it the impulse to do something, to kick, to spit, and she began to collect saliva in her mouth. For everything he had done, everything, she wanted to cast scorn and hatred on him, but she reconsidered. She was not powerless. They could not kill her. Not now. Not yet. She could buy time. She was not alone. I'm on my way, don't open the door for anybody, I will call when I get there, please, Miss Anderson, the policeman's voice, the caring, the will to make her safe, to rescue her. He was somewhere now, looking for her, he would find her; somehow or other he would find out who was hunting her. It was so obvious, he would find out, he would find her.

  She answered the man by shaking her head slowly from side to side.

  He took her hair in an iron grip. 'I'm going to hurt you,' he said. In his practical way.

  'Go ahead.' She tried to keep her voice as even as his.

  He laughed, right in her face. 'You have no idea ...'

  It didn't matter, she thought. Let him laugh.

  He let her hair go suddenly and stood up. 'Their luggage is still at the Cat & Moose ...'

  'We should have taken that long ago.'

  'We didn't know, Steve. You know what she said in the club ... Where the fuck is Barry? Call him, go get their stuff.'

  'They're not going to just give it to us, Jay.'

  She lifted her head and saw them looking at each other. There was tension between them.

  Steve, the black guy, eventually nodded, turned and left. Jay spoke to another one, one she didn't know: 'There's a hardware shop one block up, right-hand corner ...'

  She saw his hand dip into his pocket, take out a few notes and hand them over.

  'I want pruning shears. We'll cut off her toes. Then her fingers. Then her nipples. Pity though. Great tits.'

  It took a while before Fransman Dekker asked Michele Malherbe if she and Adam had slept together. Her dignity overwhelmed him when she came through the office door, so it was only later that he realised she was smaller than he thought. Her hair was blonde, cut short and her face attractive. Her age hard to pin down until he looked at her hands later and realised she must be in her late fifties or early sixties. She introduced herself, listened attentively to his rank and name and sat down in one of the guest chairs with an aura of controlled loss. Dekker could not sit at Barnard's desk, it felt wrong at that moment. He took the other guest chair.

  'It's a great loss, Inspector,' she said with her elbows on the arms of the chair and her hands held together in her lap. He could see she had been crying. He wondered, immediately, how a woman like her could fall for Adam Barnard.

  'It is,' he said. 'You knew him well?'

  'Nearly twenty-five years.'

  'Ah ... uh ... madam, I understand you know the industry very well, the circumstances ...'

  She nodded, her face serious and focused.

  'Why would someone want to ...' He searched for a euphemism. '.. . do away with him?'

  'I don't think Adam's death has anything to do with the industry, Inspector.'

  'Oh?'

  She lifted her right hand in a small gesture. There was a single, elegant ring on her middle finger. 'We may be an emotional lot, by definition. Music is emotio
n, after all, is it not? But in essence there is no great difference between the music industry and any other. We fight, we argue, we compete with each other, we say and do things that were better not said or done, but it's like that everywhere. The only big difference is that the media ... tends to wash our dirty laundry in public.'

  'I'm not sure I understand.'

  'I'm trying to say that I can't think of a single reason why anyone in Adam's world would want to murder him. I can't think of anyone who would be capable of that.' He drew in a breath to respond, but she made the same gesture and said: 'I'm not naive. I have learned that our nature allows for anything. But after a quarter-century working with people, you see all sides, and you pick up a fair amount of wisdom along the way from which you can draw in circumstances like this.'

  'Madam, the way this happened ... points to someone who had information about Adam's domestic situation.'

  She didn't look away. Her eyes were light brown. Her sensuality was subtle, he thought, maybe in the blend of what he knew about her and her refinement. 'I'm not sure I know what you are referring to.'

  'They knew about his wife, for example ...'

  Her smile was sympathetic. 'Inspector, unfortunately dear Alexandra's situation is general knowledge. Especially in the industry.'

  'Did Barnard talk about it?'

  Muted indignation. 'Adam would never dream of doing that.'

  He waited.

  'I can understand if the press makes this seem like an environment where nobody cares, Inspector, but that is a false impression. There are many of us who still have contact with Alexa, who regularly try to communicate in the hope that she will ... recover. She is a wonderful person.'

  'Are you one of them?'

  She nodded.

  'But I understand you were more than just friends with Adam Barnard?' It was deliberate.

  She looked at him in disappointment. 'I will leave my lawyer's number with Natasha,' she said and walked slowly, with dignity, to the door, opened it and closed it quietly behind her.

  He sat staring at the closed door, despising himself. Also knowing that he had no idea what to do next.

  The nurse at Casualties told Griessel he would have to talk to the superintendent and he asked her to phone him. It's not a man, the nurse bridled, and Griessel said he didn't care what it was, she had better phone.

  She dialled a number, whispered over the phone, replaced the receiver and said the superintendent was in a meeting. Her attitude intensified a few degrees.

  'Miss, I have a female detective in that operating theatre with two gunshot wounds and I don't know if she is going to make it. I have a nineteen-year-old American girl who has been abducted by people who cut her friend's throat in Long Street this morning. That...' and he had to suppress the urge to say 'fucker' with huge effort, as he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the operating theatre '... man in there is my only chance to find her before they kill her. Let me tell you now, if anything happens to her because you are obstructing the law, you will all sleep in the dirtiest, most crowded cell I can find in the Peninsula. I hope you understand me very well.'

  She swallowed her indignation and picked up the phone again with wide eyes and redialled the number. 'Julie, I think Dr Marinos should come to ICU immediately,' she said.

  At the gate of the Metropolitan Police vehicle pound the young traffic officer in a gleaming uniform opened a fat green file, paged through it fussily, pressed the relevant page flat with his palm and ran his finger down to an entry on an official form.

  'Yes, that particular vehicle was booked out at precisely twelve thirty-four with me. And here ...' he turned the page, and rotated the file so that Vusi could read it from the other side of the desk '... is the release form, stamped and signed.'

  'Who signed it?'

  The traffic officer turned the file back again and studied the signature. 'I can't say.'

  'Who can tell me?'

  'You would have to ask Administration.'

  'Where is Administration?'

  'There. In the licensing building. But you have to go upstairs. First floor.'

  'Thank you. May I take the form with me?'

  The traffic officer shook his head. 'I can't help you there. The form has to stay here.'

  Vusi thought the man was joking. But there was not a trace of humour. 'Are you serious?'

  'This file is my responsibility. Regulations.'

  'Mister ...'

  'It's Inspector.'

  'Inspector, we are working on a case of murder and abduction, we are running out of time.'

  'Administration has a duplicate of the form. Just give them the case number.'

  Vusi wondered why the man had not told him that in the first place. He took out his notebook, opened it and clicked his pen and said, 'Would you give me the number, please?'

  Mat Joubert pulled on rubber gloves, bent at the open door of Mbali Kaleni's Corsa and picked up the bullet casings in the footwell and beside the seat. He noted the number in his book. He heard the feet of Thick and Thin of Forensics shuffle on the tar beside him where they were circling the other casings with chalk and placing a small plastic triangle with a number beside every group of casings. They worked in silence.

  He stood up, leaned his big torso inside the Corsa, pressing on the headrest and the steering wheel. Kaleni's big black handbag lay on the front passenger seat. On top was an A5 notebook, the pages folded back on the spiral, blood on the top page, fine drops, something written down.

  He picked the notebook up carefully, brought it out of the car and stood upright outside. He took his reading glasses out of his breast pocket, flicked them open and placed them on the bridge of his nose. He stared at the three letters written in a shaky hand in capital letters: JAS.

  He called Jimmy, the tall, skinny forensic technologist. 'I need an evidence bag.'

  'I'll bring it, Sup.' Keen. Why did his colleagues complain about Thick and Thin? They never gave him any trouble.

  J AS. The Afrikaans for 'coat'. Unfathomable.

  Jimmy brought him a transparent ZipLoc bag and held it open. Joubert put the notebook inside so the written letters were visible. Jimmy zipped it up.

  'Thanks, Jimmy.'

  'Pleasure, Sup.'

  Joubert bent again at the open door and peered under the seat. There was a pen, but nothing else.

  He took out his own pen from his pocket and used it to scratch the other one closer until he could reach it with his fingers. He held it so he could see it through his reading glasses. Mont Blanc Starwalker. Cool Blue. On the navy-blue shaft of the pen were two faint blood prints.

  He turned and walked over to Jimmy while thinking about the pieces of evidence. The blood on the notebook was not necessarily significant. But the bloody fingerprints on the pen were. Mbali .Kaleni had written the letters J, A and S after she had been wounded. JAS?

  A perp wearing a coat? Or was it Zulu?

  He reached for his phone. He would have to find out.

  Chapter 39

  The superintendent of the City Park Hospital, a well-groomed woman in her forties, nodded her head just three times while Griessel was talking. She said: 'Captain, one moment, please,' and walked quickly through the glass doors with the lettering Operating Theatre. Personnel Only.

  Benny could not stand still. He walked as far as the nurses' desk and back to the theatre doors. Let the fucker live, please, just long enough to get what he needed. He looked at his watch. Nearly twenty-five to three. Too much time had elapsed since they took her. Too many possibilities. But they hadn't shot Rachel Anderson, because there was something they wanted. It was his only chance, his only hope.

  At the periphery of his consciousness something flitted past, ghostly visions, fleeting and intangible, leaving only an impression - this morning. He stood still and closed his eyes. What was it? His brain seemed to tell him that, no, the wounded fucker was not his only hope. There was something else. He must go back to the beginning. This morning, what had h
appened? At the churchyard? What were the important things? The rucksack, cut off Erin Russel...

  The superintendent burst through the doors and came over to Griessel. She began to speak before she reached him. 'Captain, his carotid artery was cut, relatively high up, I'm afraid, where there is not much protection. He lost an enormous amount of blood, we had a Code Blue in there, but they were able to resuscitate him. His condition is critical, they are still trying to close the wound, under the circumstances a very difficult procedure, especially since his blood pressure is so low and the bleeding could not be entirely halted. But I am afraid there is no chance of you talking to him in the next five or six hours. Even then I doubt whether communication will be meaningful. His vocal chords have been damaged, apparently - to what extent they don't yet know.'

  He digested the information, frustration forcing a curse to the surface, but he swallowed it down.

  'Doc, his clothes, I want his clothes, anything he had on him.'

  'I'm going to call,' said Bill Anderson decisively. He got up abruptly from the leather couch and went to the phone on his desk. He looked at the number he had written down, picked up the receiver and keyed it in. He stood listening to the initial silence on the line and then the crystal clear ring on the southernmost tip of another continent.

  Griessel's phone rang and he looked at the screen, saw it was MAT JOUBERT and answered: 'Mat?'

  'Benny, I don't know what it means but Mbali Kaleni wrote the word "jas" in her notebook, and I am reasonably sure it was after she was shot. There are bloody fingerprints on the pen and blood spatters on the page. I thought it might be Zulu, but it doesn't seem to be.'

  'Jas?' then he heard the soft ring tone of another incoming call. 'Mat, hold for me.' He saw the long number, the unfamiliar code, and knew who it would be.

  God.

  He couldn't talk to them now, he couldn't, what would he say? What could he say?

  Sorry?

  They would be terribly worried because he hadn't phoned. This was their child. They had the right to know.